In the Aftermath of Question 2:

Students with Limited English Proficiency in Massachusetts

By Antoniya Owens

Rappaport Public Policy Fellow

Massachusetts Office for Refugees and Immigrants

June 2010

This report was written for the Massachusetts Office for Refugees and Immigrants, under the auspices of the Rappaport Public Policy Fellowship program at the Harvard Kennedy School. The author would like to thank Richard Chacon and Samantha Shusterman at the Office for Refugees and Immigrants and Carrie Conaway at the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education for helpful comments on previous drafts. Special thanks go to the Rappaport Foundation for making this project possible through generous financial support.

Table of Contents

Executive Summary.................................................................................................................................................. 1

Terms and Definitions............................................................................................................................................. 5

I. Introduction ........................................................................................................................................................... 6

II. The Commonwealths Experience with Bilingual Education..................................................................... 7

Bilingual Education in Massachusetts Prior to Question 2 ................................................................ 7

: The Ballot Initiative ............................................................................................................. 8Question 2Question 2: Policy Details......................................................................................................................... 8

Question 2: Implementation .................................................................................................................... 9

Financing LEP Student Education ....................................................................................................... 11

III. Enrollment Trends and Demographic Characteristics............................................................................. 12

Trends in Enrollment and Program Placement.................................................................................. 12

Demographic Characteristics ................................................................................................................. 15

IV. Student Engagement ....................................................................................................................................... 19

Attendance Rates ...................................................................................................................................... 19

Suspension Rates ...................................................................................................................................... 20

Grade Retention Rates ............................................................................................................................ 20

High School Dropout Rates................................................................................................................... 20

V. Academic Achievement.................................................................................................................................... 21

MCAS Results: A Snapshot of 2008..................................................................................................... 21

MCAS Results: Trends in Performance from 2001 to 2008 ............................................................ 22

VI. District-level Analysis of Student Engagement and Academic Achievement...................................... 27

Student Engagement................................................................................................................................ 27

Academic Achievement........................................................................................................................... 31

Student Outcomes and Program Placement ....................................................................................... 32

VII. School Case Studies ....................................................................................................................................... 33

Brockton High School............................................................................................................................. 34

Fuller Middle School................................................................................................................................ 36

Executive Summary

In November 2002, Massachusetts voters approved Question 2, a ballot initiative to replace transitional bilingual education (TBE) with sheltered English immersion (SEI)an instructional model that teaches students with limited English proficiency all academic content in English. The mandate became fully effective in the fall of academic year 2003-04. Although its implementation has varied somewhat across the state, the majority of limited English-proficient students (LEP) in Massachusetts are now enrolled in SEI programs. Still, to date there has been no comprehensive statewide assessment of the effects of this policy change on students engagement outcomes and academic performance.

This report seeks to fill a part of this knowledge gap. Its primary research objective is to identify how many students in the state are assessed as LEP and are thus subject to such policy changes, who they are, and how they have fared at school relative to their English-proficient classmates. To the extent that data availability allows, the report also seeks to evaluate how Question 2 has influenced LEP students school engagement and academic

Key Findings

Enrollment and Program Placement

Over the past decade, the enrollment of both non-native English speakers and LEP students has grown substantially. During academic year 2009, more than 147,000 students in Massachusetts spoke English as a second languageup by 20 percent from a decade earlier. Of these, 57,000 lacked English proficiencyover a quarter more than in 1999.

The number of English-proficient students has remained steady, and as a result, the relative importance of non-native English speakers and of LEP students has also increased. The share of enrollment comprised by non-native speakers grew from 12.8 percent in 1999 to 15.4 percent a decade later. Over the same period, the percentage of students with limited English proficiency rose from 4.7 percent to 5.9 percent

outcomes, by comparing time trends for LEP and English-proficient students for several years before and after Question 2. These questions are explored for Massachusetts as well as for twenty-two school districts with large enrollments of LEP students.

At the same time, data constraints as well as the varied implementation of the previous TBE mandate and the new law make it difficult to attribute unambiguously any differences in outcomes to the particular teaching model in use. For example, school engagement and academic achievement data are not disaggregated by the type of English language program in which LEP students are enrolled. Thus, this report does not attempt to determine the superiority of one English language instructional model over the other, or to disentangle the independent effects of Question 2 from those of other factors that influence student outcomes, such as socioeconomic background or the 1993 Education Reform Act.

The key findings of the report are summarized below.

The relative shares of LEP students and of non-native speakers vary widely across the selected school districts. The share of non-native English speakers is the highest in Chelsea, at 84 percent, and the lowest in Leominster, at 18 percent. In Lowell, one in three students has limited English proficiency; in New Bedford, their share is only 4.4 percent.

Five years after the passage of Question 2, the vast majority of LEP students in the state were enrolled in sheltered English immersion programs, though program placement varies by school district. In academic year 2008, 81.1 percent of the states LEP students attended sheltered English classrooms. Seventy percent of all school districts in the state had 90 percent or more of their LEP students in SEI programs. Five percent of all LEP students

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were enrolled in either a two-way bilingual program or another form of bilingual education. One in ten opted out of English language services altogether.

LEP students are disproportionately enrolled in elementary school. During academic year 2008, two thirds of the states LEP students were enrolled in kindergarten through fifth grade. Sixteen percent attended middle school; the remaining 18 percent were high school students. In contrast, 46 percent of English-proficient students were in elementary school, a quarter were middle school students, and nearly one third attended high school.

Demographic Characteristics

Both students with limited English proficiency and English-proficient students are slightly more likely to be male than female at the state level and in most school districts.

LEP students are much more racially and ethnically diverse than their English-speaking peers in the Commonwealth. They are more likely to be Hispanic or Asian and much less likely to be white. More than half of LEP students are Hispanic, and another 18 percent are Asian. Non-Hispanic whites account for only 12 percent of statewide LEP enrollment.